Articles from February 2007

The creative community has an almost unnatural fear of piracy. Billions are being spent to protect works of art from “unlawful distribution”. Billions. Like millions, but bigger. Because it starts with a B. The belief is that each and every time someone grabs something off the Internet for free, a sale is lost. There isn’t […]

It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how the New York Times Book Review — or rather its editorial staff — keeps digging holes and then tripping headfirst into them. You’d think they’d absorb the knowledge that their male-to-female reviewer ratio is woeful, maybe take some conscious steps to correct the problem, and, well, move on. […]

As many of you are aware, we strongly advocate a little thing called “knowing what you’re doing”. This does not contradict our position when it comes to Making Stuff Up. Quite the contrary. We believe, among other things, that people who sign contracts should know what the contracts say. We also believe that people who […]

Tell us, dear friends, are you as amused as we are by the coverage of the Clive Cussler versus Philip Anschutz debacle? You know the one — Mr. Anschutz is accusing Mr. Cussler of, gasp!, overstating his sales in order to receive a bigger paycheck. Somehow (and this has never really been made clear), this […]

Recently, Maureen Dowd went to a bookstore. This shouldn’t be news, but one suspects this was a rare event in her life. One also suspects she’ll avoid the experience in the future. What she saw terrified her: nubile pink books snuggled up against aged gray novels. Surely she thought the sweet young things would take […]

It’s been a little over two years when Booksquare suggested I blog over here. It was December 2004. My first book was out, and BS thought people might want to read about a first time author’s trials and tribulations. Or maybe she didn’t think I’d really do it and has been secretly laughing about it […]

We woke today with grand plans to execute a post with brilliance and wit, but now we’re, well, thinking about the MySpace thing and, as always, remain puzzled by the media’s insistence that it’s going to save the world (when we all know that fate rests on the fragile shoulders of Peter Petrelli). While we’re […]

Yesterday, guest blogger Diane Lefer set the stage for today’s post by telling us about symbols and their visceral impact on people. In today’s installment, she protests, goes to jail, wins a grant, doesn’t get the money, learns that key to surviving incarceration is knowing show tunes, deals with a cat who isn’t shy about […]

We are proud to say that we meet many fascinating people. What seems like a casual hello at an open house can lead to a lengthy, intense discussion about something you never expected. When we met Diane Lefer at a party, we discovered that a mutual friend had been trying to get us in the […]

Far be it for us to tell other people how to run their business, but we simply cannot take the strain any longer. For weeks now, all the major newspapers have run stories about the decline of this neighborhood bookstore, the threat to that small shop, the fear that we’re losing the souls of our […]